Report on the 20th ECCO IBD Intensive Course for Trainees, Virtual 2022
Kostas Karmiris, EduCom Member
 Kostas Karmiris © ECCO |
The 20th ECCO IBD Intensive Course for Trainees was held virtually on February 16, 2022 as part of ECCO’s educational programme. This is ECCO’s oldest and most established course. This year, a total of 115 participants from 34 countries from Europe and elsewhere attended the course and were offered a comprehensive update on IBD. The course focused on pivotal insights into the medical management of IBD patients in an interactive manner.
The programme was divided into two sessions. The morning session was dedicated to formal lectures. It opened with a comprehensive integrative talk on the epidemiology and immunopathogenesis of IBD, which was followed by nine concise practical talks on each of the currently available treatment strategies and on medication in the pipeline. An interesting lecture on the positioning of therapeutic strategies concluded this session. The afternoon round table session aimed to encourage interaction and discussion. Setting it up was a challenge because of the virtual character of the course. It comprised seven brief lectures focusing on practical IBD cases and dilemmas that were delivered by pairs of instructors in a tandem format, with sufficient time allowed for Q&As. Participants had the opportunity to learn about and discuss each of the seven carefully selected topics: pregnancy in IBD, extra-intestinal manifestations, when and how to start biologics, complications associated with anti-TNFα therapy, therapeutic drug monitoring, exit strategies and therapeutic endoscopy in IBD. The discussions allowed integration of the knowledge gained during the morning sessions with practical day-to-day aspects of care.
The faculty was given the task of interacting with the trainees. Despite the technical difficulties associated with the virtual set-up, participants showed lots of interest throughout the course, with many questions and lively discussions. The on-demand videos of the presentations will be available for ECCO Members soon after the closing of the ECCO'22 virtual congress platform and can be watch via the e-CCO Learning Platform (available end of May 2022).
The overall evaluation of the course showed a high level of satisfaction among the participants, with a score of 4,6/5. 27 particularly expressed satisfaction with the round table case-based discussions despite the absence of direct interaction with the faculty.
I would like to thank the members of the ECCO Office for their hard work in organising this course in a challenging environment, as well as the contributing speakers and faculty, who made the course so successful. Finally, I wish to thank my colleagues on EduCom for their time, energy and investment.
On behalf of the ECCO Educational Officer: Fernando Magro
On behalf of the ECCO Educational Committee: Henit Yanai (Chair), Paulo Kotze, Marietta Iacucci, Christian Maaser, Pierre Ellul
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